SACRED CYCLE

SACRED CYCLE

by

Jamie Dedes

I wrote the first version of this a year ago. I was sitting in a Buddhist center were the children had designed a large mandala in collage to celebrate the Buddha’s birthday, which is April 8. The mandala was filled with pictures and drawings of nature scenes, the Buddha, stupas, and children at play. I was totally engaged by it with its color, movement, and imagination. The children’s mandala came together for me with the Tibetan Buddhist custom of creating mandala of colored sands, which are then blown away to remind us of the impermanence of the material world. This poem is the result. Although it has elements that are consistent with the Buddhist system, I didn’t write it as a Buddhist statement, just an imaginative one.

Is there – could it be – that there’s

more than one god, one eternity,

more than one universe, and Time

at their service, really nothing more

than a simple saffron-robed monk; a

being meditating, mediating realms

of Chaos, pulling colors and lights

and energies into lively mandala,

galaxies of air, fire, earth, blood.

·

And could it be that the blood are

uneasy souls, passing drowsy days

and nights in deep sleep, believing

dark, dank demons whispering …

“The moon never dies.”

But demons do as demons do: they lie.

·

So unready and fearful, poor souls,

when one day wind and fire stormily

march in, tramping on and through

coherence with feet deft and dusty

and in Chaos whirling and roiling,

souls passing into a renewed spin

on fate, singing desperate canticles

to nothingness, to light, to love

·

Time dons its saffron robes

sits in quiet meditation

births lively mandala

another sacred cycle begins …

Photograph of temporary sand-mandala, Drongtse Monastery, Tibet, 1993 via Wikipedia and originally posted to Flickr asamazing sand mandala by Mai Le from San Francisco, CA, USA under GNU Free Documentation License.